IMO 1981, Question 3

I had a great time solving the following question a couple of nights back. More so because I’d failed to solve this question in the past.

This question is completely unapproachable if you try to use algebra. However, generating simple examples helps.

Let me try and write down some solutions to (n^2-mn-m^2)^2=1: they are (1,2), (2,3), (3,5), (5,8)... Do you see a pattern? The answer becomes a two-liner as soon as you observe this.

Advertisement

Published by -

Graduate student

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: